Organic Eggs

We are constantly asked if we sell our "goods". We have people interested in buying our eggs, meat, garden produce, honey, milk, etc. Most of the time I tell them we don't make a habit of it, but will sell at times. I've toyed around with the idea of housing more chickens or goats, for example, so we can have more naturally raised goods for people to buy. However, we have come to the conclusion that this is not a good idea. In order to raise chickens the way God intended them to live, you'd have to have an enourmous area for a large number of chickens. By keeping a smaller number of farm animals, you will have less land/pasure burden, less disease, less parasites, less work, and happier/healthier animals. The best thing you can do, is to raise what you need for your family...period. See my earlier posts on the blog for how to homestead in the city. If you absolutely can't homestead yourself, get educated on what brands to look for. We recently passed by a number of poultry farm (Tyson Farms) when we were picking up our Holstein. I'm not kidding when I say, you could smell death in the air. The food industry is an industry - this means they are concerned about the all-mightly dollar. They are all trying to get their products into the all-mighty Wal-Mart which is another blog all-together.

Here's a henhouse picture from an organic supplier.

The Cornicopia Research scored the top selling organic brands. You can visit their website and read the "Scrabled Egg Report" here: http://www.cornucopia.org/egg-report/scrambledeggs.pdf

Here are the top scoring brands per TCR:

1. Coon Creek, Mondovi, WI
2. Kingbird Farm, Berkshire, NY
3. Krause Farm, Engandine, MI
4. Cleary Family Farm, Plainfield, VT
5. Common Good Farm, Raymond, NE
6. Highfields Farm, VT
7. Misty Meadows Farm, Everson, WA
8. Old Friends Farm, Amherst, MA
9. One Drop Farm, Cornville, ME
10. Trout Lake Abbey, Trout Lake, WA

Here are some common terms you will see on egg cartons along with the industry definitions:

Certified Organic: The birds are uncaged inside barns or warehouses, and are required to have outdoor access, but the amount, duration, and quality of outdoor access is undefined. They are fed an organic, all-vegetarian diet free of antibiotics and pesticides, as required by the USDA’s National Organic Program. Beak cutting and forced molting through starvation are permitted. Compliance is verified through third-party auditing.

Free-Range: While the USDA has defined the meaning of "free-range" for some poultry products, there are no standards in "free-range" egg production. Typically, free-range hens are uncaged inside barns or warehouses and have some degree of outdoor access, but there are no requirements for the amount, duration or quality of outdoor access. Since they are not caged, they can engage in many natural behaviors such as nesting and foraging. There are no restrictions regarding what the birds can be fed. Beak cutting and forced molting through starvation are permitted. There is no third-party auditing.

Cage-Free: As the term implies, hens laying eggs labeled as “cage-free” are uncaged inside barns or warehouses, but they generally do not have access to the outdoors. They can engage in many of their natural behaviors such as walking, nesting and spreading their wings. Beak cutting is permitted. There is no third-party auditing.

Free-Roaming: Also known as "free-range," the USDA has defined this claim for some poultry products, but there are no standards in "free-roaming" egg production. This essentially means the hens are cage-free. There is no third-party auditing.

In conclusion, raise your own food or educate yourself on what companies are the best. Remember that industry organic terms are broad and not what you would think they'd mean. Only buy from "open gate" farms - this means you can tour them at any time (good luck with getting the large farms to let you do that, by the way). Even if you buy from small homestead farms, like ours, go visit it. We have friends who never let their chickens out of the chicken yard (which is always going to be bare ground). Ask what they are feeding if you are concerned about GMOs, antibiotics, or hormones. It's almost impossible to feed chickens non-GMO products, so any chicken that is fed grain, will likely be getting GMO products. It's easy to avoid medicated or homone infused feeds, but pretty impossible and quite cost prohibited to find organic grain without GMO or by-products. The only solution, in my opinion, is to allow the chickens to free range and forage as much as possible. It's quite the balancing act to allow our chickens to free range and forage, provide water access in various parts of the property, keep them safe from preditors while they are ranging outside the safe chicken yard, and somehow encourage them to go back to the chicken yard to lay eggs while they are "out". Thankfully, we really love our chickens so it doesn't seem like work. By the way, if you are one of our egg customers, the gates are always open for ya!

Harvesting Pears

Wondering what to do with your abundance of pears? We made Pear Bread, Pear Jelly, Pear Butter, and Pear Juice. And yes, we ate some raw.













Here's my Pear Bread recipe:

2 c. brown sugar
1 c. vegetable oil
1/4 c. molasses
3 eggs
1-1/4 t. salt
1 t. baking soda
1-1/2 t. ground cinnamon
3/4 t. ground cloves
1-1/2 t. ground ginger
1/4 t. ground allspice
4 firm pears, thinly sliced
3 c. flour

Preheat oven to 350 degree and generously grease two large loaf pans. Mix brown sugar, vegetable oil, molasses, and eggs. Mix in salt, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and allspice. Stir the pear slices in, coating them evenly. Stir in flour. Pour batter into thte prepared loaf pans.

Bake for 50-60 minutes. Allow to cool in pan about 10 minutes before removing them and place them on a wire rack to cool completely.

Enjoy!

Muscovie Ducks

We have really enjoyed our Muscovie Ducks. They are quiet (unlike guineas) and eat more bugs than guineas. They are an excellent source of meat and eggs as well. These ducks will roost in trees (at least that's what they tell me - ours hasn't figured that out yet) which makes them able to be safe at night while sleeping.

We house ours with the chickens. They have a large "yard" to forage in and a small tub to swim in (although there is a pond very close to them and they haven't figured out how to get to that either). They are excellent layers and will sit on their eggs well with good mothering skills. We just love our Muscovies!

A Bigger Backyard

We've had a few people ask why we aren't adding new items to the blog. We are so excited to have expanded our "backyard", so we're trying to get that in order. We bought 16 acres of land, and a house, in the country. There are many differences to having a hobby farm in the city versus the country. Some we were aware of; some are a surprise. Kevin is working tons of forced overtime, so our process is very slow right now.

Let me share with you the blessings of God for our family - this land has some cleared areas and some raw beautiful Big Thicket woods - all fenced, established (though horribly grown-up with weeds) garden plots, old fruit & nut trees (again, out of control and not managed), a small pond, and a timber exemption (meaning super cheap taxes). We are so excited, yet overwhelemed due to the fact that the land was not managed properly. We have cleaned up the garden area enough to plant the end of season okra and fall tomatoes and are now working on an area for the chickens to provide them with a safe area for open foraging all day. I will post a photo when we're done.

We harvested some pears yesterday so I will post a couple of pear recipes that are good.

We also added guineas and Muscovy ducks to our homestead. Both of these do great with bug management and the guineas are an alert system. I'll post of photos of them soon.

The bees are doing good and if I could read their minds (if they had one), I would say they are enjoying the natural water source and nectar sources. One hive got ants in it, which is a new problem for us. If you have any solutions for that, let us know.

As soon as we get settled in, I'll add new posts and pics. We are so grateful to God for being able to buy this property.

Raising Quail

When you have limited space for your hobby farm, or you are in the city, you may want to consider raising quail. They are easy to keep, require very little space, are quiet and can provide you money, eggs, and meat. We raise Coturnix Quail (Japanese Quail) primarily. In seven weeks they will start laying and are big enough to slaughter.



This is our basic quail house. You can use a basic rabbit hutch for a small number of birds. You can easily keep 20-30 birds in here. We keep our immature birds in here and move them to the breeder box cage when they are mature. The breeder box cage has multiple seperate cages to divide them which helps you keep the ideal ratio of male:female birds together. A good ratio is one male to 3-4 females, depending on the male. The males are darker than the females and will frequently be seen mounting the females and pulling feathers off their neck. Yeah, not very romantic.

You will want to build your breeder cage with a slight tilt on the bottom the eggs will roll to the edge for you. We have an opening on our edge with the wire flooring extending past the bottom of the cage and the edge rolled to catch the egg. This is nice so you don't have to open the cage daily and upset the birds.



This is our watering system. We use the same set-up for our chickens - see that post for the bucket photo and directions. You may be able to see the small wooden box in this cage. We put dried grass clippings or small leaves and let them use this for dust baths.

With proper housing and diet, your quail will produce lots of eggs for you. There will come a time that you will start wondering what to do with all those eggs. Here's a picture of our babies hatching in the incubator. Yes, the egg turner is still in there - we obviously didn't count our incubation days right! We eat some (fried, scrambled, boiled and pickled) and incubate some.


Later I'll post some quail egg recipes. Yummm!!



Once you get used to all this, you will want to progress to the next stage: butchering the quail. This is not hard to do - imagine yourself going dove hunting and cleaning the doves. You'll get about that much breast meat, by the way. Some people like to cook up the entire bird, but to me, the dark meat is so small on this bird that it's just not worth it. You can cook quail just like you cook chicken. If you find the taste different, just use half chicken meat and half quail meat. At this point, I don't find alot of value in butchering these birds. It's a bit too much work for the little bit of meat. However, in honor of trying to live a life where we waste nothing, we butcher at times but mainly reserve it for when we have an abundance of birds or need to cull out aggressive ones.



Finally, how do you make money off these birds? We sell them at times from one week old to mature. You can even sell the dressed out birds frozen (meat).

I hope you enjoyed this post and that it gives you another avenue to explore in trying to live off the land and provide inexpensive yet high quality food for your family. There's much more you will need to know if you plan on incubating quail. This post will give you enough to get started and let you decide if you think quail will be a good addition to your hobby farm. Get 6-10 quail - keeping in mind the proper ratio of male:female with the goal of raising them for eggs. Once you get that down and have become successful at using your eggs, you will want to learn more about breeding them. You will need an incubator, a brooder box and have a basic understanding of breeding to prevent in-breeding problems.

As always, we want to remind you to start small and expect big results!

Planting Guide

I think the biggest question we get is, "When do I plant...?" Here's a link to the Jefferson County (TX) Planting Guide. This is the planting dates I go by and I rarely vary from this. The only time I varied was due to Hurricane Rita and that garden didn't produce well. At this time of the year, the only thing you have left to plant is okra. Our okra was a bumper crop last year. It's easy to grow in our climate and easy to store. We eat some, freeze some (blanch first), can some, and dehydrate some.

Here's the link: http://jefferson-tx.tamu.edu/publications/PlantingGuide.pdf

For those of you outside of Jefferson County, search the internet for your local county extension office.

Another Chicken Coop Photo

As promised - here is a photo of our smaller chicken coop. We use this one for the young chicks.

Homesteading with Chickens

A simple addition for your homestead (city or country) is chickens. They are easy to come by, easy to raise, and easy to enjoy! This is a picture of our coop. If you are in the city, it would be best to have a chicken tractor which is a movable coop. See our coop on the left. We have made a recent revision to it that isn’t pictured here. We raised the water cups a little higher because they’d get grass clippings kicked up into the water cups. This has worked great. The water system we use is a 5-gallon bucket that is suspended at the end of the coop and we have a tube that goes from the bottom of this bucket down to the water cups. The water is fed by gravity with pressure regulators. This has been great and allows us to leave them for the weekend without having someone come over to check on them. Chickens need access to water at all times. Depending on the size of your chickens and how hot the weather is, they can drink up to 2 cups of water daily. The nest boxes & roosts are at the top. This allows us to collect the eggs from the outside, without ever going into the coop. We generally let our chickens roam daily, but this isn’t a requirement. They really enjoy getting out and happy chickens produce lots of good eggs. To the left is a picture of them going through one of our gardens before the Spring planting season. This allows them to eat the weed seeds, take dust baths to remove/prevent mites and lice, turn over our soil and remove some of the winter crop cover (we use rye grass).




Our Anatolian/Pyreneese dog, Anna, is seen in the photo protecting her flock while they are taking their dust bath. There’s not a lot to protect them from here, but once we relocate to our hobby farm, she’ll be busy. This is the time of year to get your baby chicks. You can either get them from local folks, your local feed store, or order them. This year we ordered ours because we were looking for a certain type of chicken.



We got Delaware chickens this year (see pic above). This chicken originated from the U.S. and is suited for meat or egg production. Yes, we will be incubating some of our eggs and butchering our own chickens this year. We did quail last year and it went well but those birds are so tiny! But, remember our philosophy? Start small and grow with time. Back to our new chickens – the Delaware breed is a historic breed and is considered critically endangered. This brings me to write about our latest venture in homesteading. We have made the decision to start selecting breeds that are endangered, yet good producers, in order to participate in the preservation of more than ourselves.

Before adding chickens to your homestead, check your city codes (if you care). Most cities will have a code against roosters but the larger your city, or the more high dollar homes it has, you’ll find ordinances against having any type of poultry. Most of the time, you can give it a shot and if no one complains, it’ll be just fine. If you have a privacy fence and keep your coop clean and move the chicken tractor around at least weekly, no one will even know you have these birds. But, of course, I can’t recommend that you break the law – just take this information and use it how you need to.

There’s so much more to tell you about chickens, but this is a good start and hopefully you are thinking about adding them to your backyard. They pay for themselves even if all you do is eat their eggs. If you sell them or butcher them, you’ll come out ahead. It’s a great investment that your broker won’t tell you about and it’s even tax free!

Starting Your Summer Garden

It’s planting season again! We are in the process of moving, so our planting season is seriously interrupted this year. However, we’re always asked gardening questions this time of year so I thought I’d post the information here. You’ll want to get the planting guide from your local county extension office so you’ll know what and when to plant for your zone. For us, we would normally plant pole or bush beans, corn (only do this if you have plenty of space – the yield is pretty small per square foot and the nitrogen demand is huge), cucumber, eggplant, peppers, squash, and tomatoes. Make sure you have plenty of herbs too!

If you’re like most of us in the city, space is an issue. You need to plan well and determine the reason you want a garden. Is it for basic fresh veggies, saving money, just a hobby, or trying to live off the land. I’ll address each of these:

1. You want some fresh veggies: If you don’t plan on preserving your garden, only plant the amount you can reasonably consume after harvesting with a little to give away. You can stagger plant (plant things 2 weeks apart) so you’ll have a constant supply yet you won’t pick 30 tomatoes today and none for the next two weeks. Only plant things you really plan on eating a lot of. For example, if one or two dishes of squash are enough for the season, don’t plant squash. You can also trade with a friend – let them plant squash and you plant eggplant.
2. You want to save money: Focus on planting things that demand a higher value in the store. For example, peppers are cheap in the summer but they get considerably more expensive later in the year and your pepper plants should still be producing. Tomatoes are always a good choice, especially if you will preserve them by freezing or canning. We even dehydrate ours (the smaller thicker fleshed varieties). You likely use tomatoes in lots of things: spaghetti sauce, any casserole, fresh sliced or variety of salads/relishes, catsup, stews/soups, etc. I use what I can fresh, freeze what I think I can use before hurricane season, dehydrate some and then can the rest. If you are gardening to save money, you may want to consider harvesting your own seeds so you’ll have to get away from hybrids. The heirlooms do cost more to buy and to maintain the plant. They are not disease or climate resistant but you can harvest the seeds for future gardens. I’ll write a blog on our experience with heirlooms later.
3. It’s just a hobby: Plant things that are easy to care for or your hobby will turn into a headache soon. The easiest and most productive crops tend to be cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes.
4. You want to live off the land: This is a visionary goal. This subject demands an entire article but I will summarize some tips here. Start small and grow your garden every year. You will need careful planning on where to locate your garden for success now and for future growth and success. We have two separate garden areas to allow for good crop rotation and to avoid pollination of some like varieties such as cucumbers or peppers. I can’t stress enough that you need to start small. The biggest mistake is starting large and becoming overwhelmed and deciding this is not for you. Having a garden will require a lot of time. When you start out, I suggest that you plant things you can preserve easily. You must get in the mind-set to use everything from your garden – waste nothing. This means you will have to learn how to freeze, can, dehydrate and look for creative recipes for the use of your fresh veggies. Cucumbers and peppers are the best to start with. Plant plenty of those and a little of the rest. With the rest, just eat it fresh which will allow you to practice your skills with preserving the cucumbers and peppers. Next item would be squash because it’s easy to preserve, then eventually add a ton of tomatoes which are also easy to preserve, but will take a considerable amount of time if you have a lot of them. Also, tomatoes don’t hold well after being picked so you will find yourself having to preserve them about every other day. You will want to be better skilled at preserving before tying yourself down to this. Okra is another excellent crop to preserve by canning, freezing and dehydrating but this is planted later on in the heat of the summer. You will also want to plant some fruit trees if possible because it will take a few years to get a bumper crop out of your tree and by then, you’ll be really prepared and able to preserve things. Herbs are also excellent and required, in my opinion, if you really want to live off your land. Plant parsley &/or cilantro, sage, basil and chives for sure. I dehydrate my fresh herbs and use them year round. If you plan on canning pickles, plant dill. Think about what you cook with the most and plant those herbs. Most of my herbs bloom year round due to the protected area they are planted in and those that die down come back the next year. Let them go to seed once you’ve finished harvesting from them and they’ll come back next year. The gift that keeps on giving. You will also want to plant your herbs close to your kitchen if possible. This will make it easier to use them fresh. I also have extra ones mingled in my formal flower beds to maximize my space. Later you may want to venture into chickens and bees. These all work together and will provide food for you. All my garden weeds, garden bugs that I hand-pick and veggies that fall on the ground or aren’t good to pick, will go to my chickens. They love it and I love that I don’t have to buy as much feed for them. The bees are also happy with the multitudes of flowering things, they pollinate the garden, and of course, we enjoy the honey they produce.

There’s much more to discuss on gardening techniques: bed selection (location and bed heights, depth, and width) , crop rotation, organic vs. chemical treatments, watering systems, plant selection (variety, hybrid vs. heirloom), etc. We’ll address specific questions you may have and will write about these specific topics in upcoming articles.

We hope you have fun with your garden this summer and enjoy God’s creation. Although it can be a lot of work, it provides great exercise, family bonding, mental health and physical health.

The Goats' Backyard Blessings

We have wanted to start a family blog for a long time now. We're excited to start our blog and have titled it, "The Goats' Backyard Blessings" for a reason. First, God has given us a love for our home. We're not referring to the house - we're referring to our family and the resources within that God has blessed us with to provide love, shelter, food, education, and fun for all of us. This is quite a blessing. We are learning how to use the resources that right in our backyard, which God has blessed us with. This started out with a simple garden and has transformed into many facets such as dehydrating, canning, preserving, bread making, grain grinding, soap making, chicken, quail, and honey bee raising, and so on. We are now in search of acreage so that we can be more self-sufficient and learn to live off the natural resources God has blessed us with in our own backyard! We are not using this blog to advertise our doctrine, politial position, educational choice, or end of the world positions. This blog is simply a family journal that is being made public.